Weekly Review

U.S. president Donald Trump, who in the 1990s posed as his own spokesperson to brag to tabloid reporters about cheating on the woman with whom he was cheating on his wife, appointed as his communications director Anthony Scaramucci, a former hedge-fund manager who in 2015 called Trump a “hack” from “Queens County” with a “big mouth,” and who after his appointment made several media appearances in which he said he loved Trump, said leaks from the White House offended him “as a Roman Catholic,” said he was going to “fire everyone,” and said he took the job so he could “aid and abet” Trump.[1][2][3][4][5][6] Scaramucci told a journalist the president discussed with him his ability to pardon himself and members of his staff, a lawyer for Trump said Trump had never discussed pardons with anyone, and Trump tweeted that he could pardon whomever he wants.[7][8][9] Trump then tweeted that because of the cost of health care for transgender soldiers he would ban them from serving in the U.S. military, which spends an estimated ten times as much on medications that treat erectile dysfunction; and Scaramucci praised Trump as a man capable of throwing a football in a “dead spiral through a tire.”[10][11][12] Trump gave a speech before 40,000 Boy Scouts as young as 11 in which he announced that during his presidency children will say “Merry Christmas” when they “go shopping,” and told a story about when he was a “very young” man at a cocktail party in New York City with “the hottest people” and met for the first time a real-estate developer named William Levitt, who gave him life advice; and it was reported that Trump told the same story in a 2004 book, except in the latter version he was 47 years old and already acquainted with Levitt, who he claimed died two weeks after the party, but who news reports indicate spent the last 18 months of his life in the hospital suffering from a ruptured intestine.[13][14] Trump said that he “could use some more loyalty,” joked that he would “fire” one of his cabinet members, told reporters that he regretted hiring another of his cabinet members, and accepted the resignation of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, who during his six-month tenure asked journalists to be “big boys and girls,” referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers,” was spotted on one occasion hiding from reporters behind bushes on the White House lawn, and was spotted on another occasion dragging up the White House driveway a mini fridge he had taken from his staffers so he could cool beverages in his office.[15][16][17][18][19][20] Trump said he would “get somebody” if the Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act did not pass the Senate; and, after the bill failed, Trump’s secretary of the interior phoned both of Alaska’s senators and delivered a message that one senator told reporters made it “pretty clear” that “pro-jobs” policies in the state “are going to stop.”[21][23] Energy secretary Rick Perry had a phone call in which he discussed the “scientific development” of making fuel from pig manure and home-brewed alcohol with a caller who he thought was the Ukrainian prime minister but who he later discovered was a prankster from Russia.[24]A Trump adviser said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators looking into the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian government were working for the Democrats because several of them had in the past three decades donated to the Democrats a total of $56,000, an amount less than the individual Democratic contributions of Trump’s son-in-law, his daughter, his secretaries of the treasury and commerce, and Trump himself, who has donated more than $250,000 over the past 20 years.[25][26]One of Trump’s former campaign managers told a reporter that Trump has “the legal authority” to fire Mueller, a former Republican congressman said there would be a “tsunami” if Trump fired Mueller, it was reported that Trump has been considering firing Mueller, and meteorologists reported that a tropical storm named Don had formed in the Atlantic, but that it wouldn’t last long.[27][28][29][30]

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We all know dementia by now: the organ of the brain breaking down in substance and function much as a heart or liver does. By the time a person dies from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his or her brain is significantly smaller than its normal size. There are several major variants of this process, and the disorder’s progress takes many forms: insidious, incremental, dramatic, fast, and slow. The biology of loss is complicated and not entirely predictable; but in every case, memory, language, and motor control eventually slip away until a person finally sinks into silence and immobility. One could write volumes on the meaning of this gradual dissolving of a person — mustn’t it mean something?

No one would talk to me for this piece. Or rather, more than twenty women talked to me, sometimes for hours at a time, but only after I promised to leave out their names, and give them what I began to call deep anonymity. This was strange, because what they were saying did not always seem that extreme. Yet here in my living room, at coffee shops, in my inbox and on my voicemail, were otherwise outspoken female novelists, editors, writers, real estate agents, professors, and journalists of various ages so afraid of appearing politically insensitive that they wouldn’t put their names to their thoughts, and I couldn’t blame them.

Of course, the prepublication frenzy of Twitter fantasy and fury about this essay, which exploded in early January, is Exhibit A for why nobody wants to speak openly. Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list. The Twitter feminist Jessica Valenti called this prospect “profoundly shitty” and “incredibly dangerous” without having read a single word of my piece. Other tweets were more direct: “man if katie roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick.” With this level of thought policing, who in their right mind would try to say anything even mildly provocative or original?

In the early Eighties, Andy King, the coach of the Seawolves, a swim club in Danville, California, instructed Debra Denithorne, aged twelve, to do doubles — to practice in the morning and the afternoon. King told Denithorne’s parents that he saw in her the potential to receive a college scholarship, and even to compete in the Olympics. Tall swimmers have an advantage in the water, and by the time Denithorne turned thirteen, she was five foot eight. She dropped soccer and a religious group to spend more time at the pool.

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Vets removed a six-pound tongue from a young Burmese moon bear who had been dragging it on the ground, a Vietnamese bile bear whose paws were amputated to make wine had learned to walk again, and the last dancing bears of Nepal were rescued.

The National Rifle Association sued Florida, the US president agreed to discuss nuclear weapons with the North Korean supreme leader who once called him a “dotard,” and an 89-year-old nun who was involved in a lawsuit trying to prevent pop star Katy Perry from purchasing a convent collapsed during a court appearance and died.

"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."